Subramanian has produced a new biography of Haldane taking into account archival material that has only become public during the last decade. He has been able to provide a more complete picture of Haldane’s personal life than earlier biographers, such as his difficult schooldays at Eton and the deterioration of his first marriage. He has also highlighted the extent to which Haldane was kept under constant secret surveillance by British intelligence services because of his politics. However, the book is less (...) successful in its account of Haldane’s scientific work including what he contributed to modern evolutionary theory, the Fisher–Haldane relationship, Haldane’s role in the Lysenko controversy, and what he achieved after emigration to India in 1957. (shrink)

It may be thought that the title of this paper betrays a regrettable lack of sensitivity and good taste; it is as well, therefore, to explain its origin. Lewis Dexter was, I think, the first sociologist to apply a deviance perspective to the high-grade mentally retarded. ‘On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society’ argues that our discriminatory attitudes to the retarded have deep ideological roots; our social institutions tend ‘automatically’ to penalize stupidity; and repugnance often characterizes our (...) face-to-face interactions with the stupid. The pejorative label ‘stupid’ was justified precisely because identifying the stupid is a ‘commonsense’ rather than a scientific process, although commonsense does not have long to wait before it is bolstered by science. (shrink)

Biology is seen not merely as a privileged oppressor of women but as a co-victim of masculinist social assumptions. We see feminist critique as one of the normative controls that any scientist must perform whenever analyzing data, and we seek to demonstrate what has happened when this control has not been utilized. Narratives of fertilization and sex determination traditionally have been modeled on the cultural patterns of male/female interaction, leading to gender associations being placed on cells and their components. We (...) also find that when gender biases are controlled, new perceptions of these intracellular and extracellular relationships emerge. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn Merton's early work in the sociology of science three theses are identified: economic and military influence in shaping early modern science; the “Puritan spur” to scientific activity; the critical role of a democratic social order for the support of science. These themes are located in the contemporary economic crisis of the 1930s, the rise of Nazism and fascism, and the emerging radical and Marxist political activism of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Merton's interaction with (...) this context is critical for understanding his choice of problems and issues for the nascent sociology of science. The enunciation of the four-part normative structure of science is closely identified with the political ideals of this context. Merton's transition from an interest in problems of science in society to his postwar concern with the social and organizational structures of science and the social behavior of scientists is framed against the anticommunist and anti-Marxist thrust of immediate postwar politics in the United States. The implications of this change for the paradigms of the sociology of science are noted. (shrink)

The chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) is today recognized as one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers about scientific knowledge and scientific community. Yet Polanyi's philosophy of science exhibits an unresolved tension between science as a traditional community and science as an intellectual marketplace. Binding together these different models was important for his overall intellectual and political project, which was a defense of bourgeois liberal order. His philosophy of science and his economic thought were mutually supporting elements within this (...) political project. Polanyi's intellectual corpus formed a contradictory unity, the tensions within which were manageable only under particular historical conditions. His attempt to hold together traditional authority and the free market fit with, and derived plausibility from, the social conditions under which his philosophical work came to maturity: Keynesian class compromise and surviving habits of social deference within postwar Britain. (shrink)

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and ‘the West’. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

This article explores the impact of the VASKhNIL conference upon the cultural policy of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and Italian communist biology, with particular attention to the period between 1948 and 1951. News of the Moscow session did not appear in the Italian news media until October, 1948, and for the next three years party biologists struggled over whether to translate the official transcript of the proceedings, The Situation in Biological Science, into Italian. This struggle reveals the complex efforts (...) of the PCI to confirm the ideological and political connection with the Soviet Union, without completely alienating significant milieus of the democratic and antifascist culture in Italy. The apparent impossibility of doing both is indicated by the fact that the project was finally abandoned in March-April, 1951. The article is divided into three sections, each focused on different actors and their response to Lysenkoism. The first section outlines the features of the PCI's pro-Lysenko campaign, with particular regard to the intellectual militancy and organizational commitment of Emilio Sereni, head of PCI's Cultural Commission between 1948 and 1951. The second section analyzes the reaction of the three most important figures in Italian communist biology during this period, Massimiliano Aloisi, Franco Graziosi and Emanuele Padoa. The third section interprets the decision not to publish a translation of The Situation in Biological Science as a consequence of the conflicts between PCI cultural program and the editorial policy of the left-wing publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore. (shrink)

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings (...) are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book consists of a collection of essays which dramatically develop Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a conception of science that I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a conception of rationality I call aim-oriented rationalism. This has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions. The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. (shrink)

This book argues for the need to put into practice a profound and comprehensive intellectual revolution, affecting to a greater or lesser extent all branches of scientific and technological research, scholarship and education. This intellectual revolution differs, however, from the now familiar kind of scientific revolution described by Kuhn. It does not primarily involve a radical change in what we take to be knowledge about some aspect of the world, a change of paradigm. Rather it involves a radical change in (...) the fundamental, overall intellectual aims and methods of inquiry. At present inquiry is devoted to the enhancement of knowledge. This needs to be transformed into a kind of rational inquiry having as its basic aim to enhance personal and social wisdom. This new kind of inquiry gives intellectual priority to the personal and social problems we encounter in our lives as we strive to realize what is desirable and of value – problems of knowledge and technology being intellectually subordinate and secondary. For this new kind of inquiry, it is what we do and what we are that ultimately matters: our knowledge is but an aspect of our life and being. (shrink)

This article outlines the distinctive contribution of Marxism to science studies. It traces the trajectory of Marxist ideas through the decades from the origins of Marxism to the present conjuncture. It looks at certain key episodes, such as the arrival of a Soviet delegation at the International History of Science Congress in London in 1931, as well as subsequent interactions between Marxists and exponents of other positions at later international congresses. It focuses on the impact of several generations of Marxists (...) who have engaged with science in diverse ways. It examines the influence of Marxism on contemporary trends in science studies. It concludes that Marxism survives in circuitous and complex ways. It argues not only for a positive interpretation of its contribution in the past but for its explanatory and ethical power in the present and future. (shrink)

This essay traces the parallel, but unrelated, evolution of two sets of reactions to traditional idealist history of science in a world-historical context. While the scholars who fostered the postcolonial approach, in dealing with modern science in the non-West, espoused an idealist vision, they nevertheless stressed its political and ideological underpinnings and engaged with the question of its putative Western roots. The postidealist history of science developed its own vision with respect to the question of the global spread of modern (...) science, paying little heed to postcolonial debates. It then proposes a historiographical approach developed in large part by historians of South Asian politics, economics, and science that, without compromising the preoccupations of each of the two groups, could help construct a mutually comprehensible and connected framework for the understanding of the global workings of the sciences. (shrink)

Robert Merton may not remember it, but in the 1930s we met in Cambridge and took one or more walks together – 1 think they were along Trapelo Road in Waltham, then a rural lane. Our conversation must have been interesting, since I remember the episode, but I can only guess at the subject. Since Merton was working on the sociology of science in Newton's day and I had a long standing interest in the relations between mathematics and society, especially (...) at the dawn of capitalism, it is very likely that we discussed the Hessen paper of 1931, published inScience at the Cross Roads. The paper had impressed me, as it had impressed several British scientists of the younger generation, including J. D. Bernal and Joseph Needham; Merton's dissertation, when it appeared, showed that Hessen's “provocative essay” had made its impression on his work as well. It also showed that he was aware of some of the oversimplifications of the Hessen lecture, as was G. N. Clark (see Clark 1937a; Clark 1937b, chap. 3). The almost total omission of the religious factor was one of them. (shrink)

The World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFScW) and UNESCO share roots in the Social Relations of Science (SRS) movements and in the Franco-British scientific relations which developed in the 1930s. In this historical context (the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and the Nazi use of science, the social and intellectual fascination for the USSR), a new model of scientific internationalism emerged, where science and politics mixed. Many progressive scientists were involved in the war efforts against Nazism, and tried to (...) prolong their international commitments into peacetime. They contributed to the establishment of the WFScW and of UNESCO in 1945–1946. Neither the WFScW nor UNESCO succeeded in achieving their initial aims. Another world emerged from the immediate post-war years, but it was not the world fancied by the progressive scientists from the mould of scientific internationalism. The aim of this article is to follow the path from the Franco-British networks towards the establishment of the WFScW and UNESCO; from an ideological scientific internationalism towards practical projects. It is to understand how these two bodies came to embody two different scientific internationalisms during the Cold War. (shrink)

The text introduces a translation of Ilyenkov’s famous text “On the State of Philosophy,” which was meant as a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU and expressed his exasperation with the development of Soviet philosophy. In our introduction, we describe the historical context of the emergence of the letter, including the main changes in Soviet philosophy in the 1960s (esp. rise in popularity of cybernetics), and the institutional details of Ilyenkov’s biography. We point to the contemporary relevance of (...) the letter by emphasizing how Ilyenkov’s dialectical account of science can enrich contemporary discussions in the sociology of science and STS. (shrink)

British biologist and science populariser J. B. S. Haldane was known as a contrarian, whose myriad ideas and beliefs would shift to oppose whomever he chose to argue with. Yet Haldane's support for synthetic food remained remarkably stable throughout his life. This article argues that Haldane's engagement with synthetic food during the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by his frustration with the status and direction of scientific research in Britain. Drawing upon the Haldane Papers, I reconstruct how Haldane's interest in (...) synthetic food emerged from the biochemical and physiological optimism of the early 20th century. His mid-20th-century writings were an opportunity for Haldane to voice his political opinions. He attempted to erase the conceptual divide between farm and factory, maintained that food shortages were a capitalist construct, and criticised British colonialism. By pointing out the failure of existing economic systems and governments to develop synthetic food, Haldane made the case that food production should be placed under the control of biologists. (shrink)

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political (...) tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines some of the ways that machines, mechanisms, and the new mechanics were treated in post-World War I discourse. Spengler's 1919Decline of the Westand Hessen's 1931 study of Newton have usually been tied closely to Weimar culture in Germany, and Soviet politics. Linking them also to the writings of Rathenau, Simmel, Chase, Mumford, Hayek, and others, as well as to Dada and film studies of the city will indicate central features of a wide-ranging, international discourse on the machine (...) and mechanization. I argue that machines were so thoroughly integrated into social and economic experience that we can treat this as a distinctive new phase in the cultural history of mechanics, what some contemporaries called the “machine age”: a period in which rather than the hand mill or steam engine, the city stands as an appropriate realization (and sometimes symbol) of the significance but also ambiguities and tensions of mechanical life; and concepts of mechanization were extended to encompass the economy and market mechanisms. (shrink)

This essay examines the reception of Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes in early to mid-twentieth century Britain. Recent work on the political interpretation of biology has shown that the nineteenth-century strategy of “making socialists” was undermined by August Weismann’s attacks on the inheritance of acquired characters. I argue that Pavlov’s research reinvigorated socialist hopes of transforming society and the people in it. I highlight the work of Pavlov’s interpreters, notably the scientific journalist J. G. Crowther, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, (...) and the science writer H. G. Wells, who made Pavlov’s work accessible to a British audience and embraced the socialist implications of his research – especially the idea that people could be persuaded to become socialists through science writing for a nonspecialist audience and through use of a simplified language such as Basic English. They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing. The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room for human agency. (shrink)

Remedios and Dusek have provided a useful contextualization of Steve Fuller’s recent work in social epistemology. While they have provided some good criticisms of some of Fuller’s new ideas, they fail to provide a systematic critique of Fuller’s retreat from a naturalistic and materialist social epistemology for one embracing transhumanism, intelligent design, and the proactionary imperative. An alternative approach is developed, drawing on Fuller’s early work and incorporating recent work on our biological and cultural evolution as a species.

In 1946, the British biochemist Joseph Needham returned from a four-year stay in China. Needham scholars have considered this visit as a revelatory period that paved the way for his famous book seriesScience and Civilization in China. Surprisingly, however, Needham's actual time in China has remained largely unstudied over the last seventy years. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham travelled throughout Free China to promote cooperation between British and Chinese scientists to contain the Japanese invasion during the (...) Second World War. By rediscovering Needham's peregrinations, this paper re-examines the origins of his fascination for China. First, it contests the widely held idea that this Chinese episode is quite separate and different from Needham's first half-life as a leftist scientist. Second, it demonstrates how the political and philosophical commitments he inherited from the social relations of science movement, and his biochemical research, shaped his interest in China's past. Finally, this paper recounts these forgotten years to reveal their implications for his later pursuits as historian of science and as director of the natural-science division of UNESCO. It highlights how, while in China, Needham co-constituted the philosophical tenets of his scientific programme at UNESCO and the conceptual foundations of hisSCC. (shrink)

Until recently the British zoologist Lancelot Hogben has usually appeared as a campaigning socialist, an anti-eugenicist or a popularizer of science in the literature. The focus has mainly been on Hogben after he became a professor of social biology at the London School of Economics in 1930. This paper focuses on Hogben’s life in the 1920s. Early in the decade, while based in London, he focused on cytology, but in 1922, after moving to Edinburgh, he turned his focus on experimental (...) zoology, first concentrating on vertebrate endocrinology and later moving over to the comparative physiology of invertebrate muscle. In the early 1920s Hogben played an active role in the development of experimental zoology in Britain. As such he was a fearless critic of evolutionary and metaphysical speculations. But in this period Hogben’s career prospects were seriously hampered by his confrontational nature and serious depression. As a result he was forced to leave Britain in 1925. He first accepted a position in Canada and in the period 1927–1930 he was a professor of zoology in South Africa. This paper will also add crucial new material to James Tabery’s recent discussion of the history behind Hogben’s ideas about the interaction of heredity and environment in individual development. In addition a previously unknown Lamarckian controversy will be discussed. (shrink)

What Is Race? Evidence from Scientists (1952) is a picture book for schoolchildren published by UNESCO as part of its high-profile campaign on race. The 87-page, oblong, soft-cover booklet contains bold, semi-abstract, pared-down images accompanied by text, devised (so it declared) to make scientific concepts ‘more easily intelligible to the layman’. Produced by UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communication, the picture book represents the organization’s early-postwar confidence in the power of scientific knowledge as a social remedy and diplomatic tool. In keeping (...) with a significant component of the race campaign, What Is Race? presented genetics as the route to an enlightened, scientific, non-prejudiced understanding of race. This article seeks to explain the book’s management, aesthetics and framing in the context of postwar disciplinary and international politics. Viewing UNESCO’s race campaign as a high point for an internationalist ideology of mass education, this article also analyses the visual and literary arguments of What Is Race? and proposes that the enduring image of genetics as technical and neutral knowledge was in part shaped by UNESCO’s efforts to communicate scientific authority to an apparently ‘popular’ audience. (shrink)

Besides his activities as a theoretical physicist, the Belgian Léon Rosenfeld cultivated and showed a lively concern for history of science since his student years. This paper is a study of his publications, correspondence and other endeavours in history of science, mainly during the early Cold War period, in order to explore his essentially Marxist views on science and society and how they differed from those of other Marxists scholars, most notably John D. Bernal and Boris Hessen.

This paper argues that that political context of British science popularization in the inter-war period was intimately tied to contemporary debates about religion and science. A leading science popularizer, the Quaker astronomer A.S. Eddington, and one of his opponents, the materialist Chapman Cohen, are examined in detail to show the intertwined nature of science, philosophy, religion, and politics.

When the journal Minerva was founded in 1962, science and higher educational issues were high on the agenda, lending impetus to the interdisciplinary field of “Science Studies” qua “Science Policy Studies.” As government expenditures for promoting various branches of science increased dramatically on both sides of the East-West Cold War divide, some common issues regarding research management also emerged and with it an interest in closer academic interaction in the areas of history and policy of science. Through a close reading (...) of many early issues of Minerva but also of its later competitor journal Science Studies (now called Social Studies of Science) the paper traces the initial optimism of an academically based Science Studies dialogue across the Cold War divide and the creation in 1971 of the International Commission for Science Policy Studies as a bridging forum, one that Minerva strangely chose to ignore. In this light, attention is drawn to aspects of the often forgotten history of Science Studies in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European block. Reviewed also are several early discussions that are still relevant today: e.g., regarding differing concepts of Big Science, science and democracy, autonomy in higher education and what conditions are necessary to sustain academic freedom and scientific integrity (some of Edward Shils’ primary concerns). Finally, it is noted how the question of quantitative methods to measure scientific productivity lay at the heart of a “Science of Science” movement of the 1960s has re-emerged in a new form integral to the notion of a “Science of Science Policy.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile there have been numerous critiques of the ideology of technology, it is useful to situate technology within both a liberal and a conspiratorial framework. The early work of Auguste Comte offers an ideal vehicle for this kind of analysis. Liberalism’s embrace of technology is developed in Comte to produce a theory of scientific and technical elites intent on reinventing society and the individual. This “technological conspiracy” reads very much like elements of a Silicon Valley manifesto describing the cyber-utopia of (...) a near tomorrow. For these reasons Comte is relevant to a discussion of conspiracy today. (shrink)

The role played by scientists in opposing nuclear weapons policy in Britain has been underestimated or discounted in much of the historical literature on the 1940s and 1950s. In fact an active and vocal section of scientific opinion attempted to organize public opposition to nuclear weapons. This article describes their activities. It also assesses their significance in the wider anti-nuclear weapons movement in the years leading to the foundation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Chris Renwick’s recent research into the fate of William Beveridge’s attempt to establish social biology as the foundational social science at the London School of Economics is history at its best by uncovering a moment in the past when decisions were taken comparable to ones being taken today. In this case, the issues concern the political and scientific foundations of the welfare state. By connecting Beveridge’s original reasoning to recruit Lancelot Hogben for the Rockefeller-sponsored social biology chair with his later (...) formative role in the design of the British welfare state, we are able to witness an alternative vision of the left, one associated with the Fabian movement, which proceeded independently of its Marxist cousin. The Fabian focus on taxing “inheritance” in the broadest sense remains relevant to how we think about the human condition in an era when capitalism has come to encompass the ownership of genetic material. (shrink)

The ArgumentMichael Polanyi is placed in the ongoing Enlightenment-reform tradition as one of the first twentieth-century scientists to propose a program to correct the gravest internal conflict of the modern Enlightenment project of radical criticism: scientific detachment and moral nihilism in conflict with humanist values. He held that radical criticism leads not to truth but to destructive doubt. Only the inclusion of the “personal element,” the judicial attitude of reasonable doubt and the acknowledgment of belief in the regulative principle of (...) truth can overcome this end. Freedom — to reason, to criticize the method of doubt, and freedom of scientific thinking — is a precondition to reach truth. His epistemology of nonsubjective personal knowledge has redefined scientific knowing and objectivity as grounded in tacit knowing. Debate is continuing on objectivity and freedom versus the social duty of science. Polanyi's Hungarian correspondence highlights his commitment to truth and the contemporary cultural-political situation of Jewish intellectuals. (shrink)

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Volume 52, Issue 5, Page 306-321, September 2022.

This article explores the impact of the VASKhNIL conference upon the cultural policy of the Italian Communist Party and Italian communist biology, with particular attention to the period between 1948 and 1951. News of the Moscow session did not appear in the Italian news media until October, 1948, and for the next three years party biologists struggled over whether to translate the official transcript of the proceedings, The Situation in Biological Science, into Italian. This struggle reveals the complex efforts of (...) the PCI to confirm the ideological and political connection with the Soviet Union, without completely alienating significant milieus of the democratic and antifascist culture in Italy. The apparent impossibility of doing both is indicated by the fact that the project was finally abandoned in March–April, 1951. The article is divided into three sections, each focused on different actors and their response to Lysenkoism. The first section outlines the features of the PCI’s pro-Lysenko campaign, with particular regard to the intellectual militancy and organizational commitment of Emilio Sereni, head of PCI’s Cultural Commission between 1948 and 1951. The second section analyzes the reaction of the three most important figures in Italian communist biology during this period, Massimiliano Aloisi, Franco Graziosi and Emanuele Padoa. The third section interprets the decision not to publish a translation of The Situation in Biological Science as a consequence of the conflicts between PCI cultural program and the editorial policy of the left-wing publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore. (shrink)

This article revisits the left-wing response to sociobiology in the 1970s and 1980s by examining the sociobiology debate in Finland in a larger European context. It argues that the Finnish academic left’s response to sociobiology represents a “third way” alongside the purely negative, often Marxist denial of biology’s relevance, which characterized the left’s response to sociobiology in many European countries such as Hungary and Sweden, and alongside the disregard that sociobiology confronted in most parts of Eastern Europe, as well as (...) in Germany. In the context of the last great political conflict of the Cold War in Europe, the controversy over the American “Euromissiles” in 1979–1983, the Finnish academic left challenged the allegedly fatalistic sociobiological aggression and war theories with an alternative biological language, turning the increasing enthusiasm over evolutionary ideas into a pacifist cause. Using leftist and pacifist forums to inform citizens and politicians of such biologically evolved human characteristics as mutual care and sociability, the Finnish critics of sociobiology wished to boost the public spirit, and to rationalize the pacifist ideal of the European-wide popular movement against nuclear weapons and militarism. As a result, the academic leftists in Finland revived the early twentieth-century tradition of “peace biology.” A proper understanding of this development calls for an analysis that acknowledges Finland’s special geopolitical and cultural position in the Cold War world between East and West. (shrink)

Stephen T. Casper and Steve Fuller’s commentaries on my paper “Completing Circle of the Social Sciences? William Beveridge and Social Biology at the London School of Economics during the 1930s” raises important questions about the historical entanglement of the political left, welfarism, biology, and social science. In this response, I clarify questions about my analysis of events at the London School of Economics in the early twentieth century and identify ways in which they are important in the present. I suggest (...) that there is much to be learned from the school’s failed experiment with social biology, not least when it comes to thinking about the historical contingency of relationships between progressive politics and biology. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the interaction between science, philosophy and politics (including ideology) in the early work of J. B. S. Haldane (from 1922 to 1937). This period is particularly important, not only because it is the period of Haldane's most significant biological work (both in biochemistry and genetics), but also because it is during this period that his philosophical and political views underwent their most significant transformation. His philosophical stance first changed from a radical organicism to a position far more (...) compatible with mechanical materialism. The primary intellectual influence that was responsible for this shift was that of F. G. Hopkins. Later, Haldane came to accept Marxism and its official metaphysics, dialectical materialism, a move that let him accept the materialist conception of the world while still maintaining a resolute distance from mechanism. Throughout all these changes, what is most obvious is the influence of science on Haldane's philosophical views. An influence in the opposite direction is far less apparent. (shrink)

SummaryThe outbreak of war in 1914 found Britain unprepared for a lengthy conflict. British science and industry were particularly ill-prepared to meet the demands of static warfare. Within two years, however, mobilization had made appreciable strides, and, as Britain's munitions industries moved from crisis to confidence, Britain's chemical industry was transformed by an arsenal of ‘garrison chemists’, with skills either born of necessity or borrowed from overseas. At the same time, Britain's chemical leadership traced a path that led them from (...) voluntarist to corporate methods, from private to public initiatives, and from individual to collective behaviours. This paper suggests four key stages in this mobilization, and hints at the significance of the war for the emergence of new sub-disciplines, for the careers of chemists, for academic-government relations in research, and for the image, status, and international position of British chemistry on the threshold of the postwar world. (shrink)